


What Goes Around....

by alittlebriton



Series: Infinite Loop [1]
Category: Alias (TV)
Genre: F/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-02
Updated: 2015-08-02
Packaged: 2018-04-12 15:35:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4484915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alittlebriton/pseuds/alittlebriton
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sark finds new teachers and becomes an ideal student</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Goes Around....

##  _Past_

When he was thirteen, he gained a new philosophy tutor. She seemed to take pity on the lanky blonde, paying him more attention than the others and encouraging his thoughts and logic. Before the long summer holiday, she asked him if he wished to stay in her house in the country to learn how to hunt. She knew that his mother was ill, and he didn’t seem to have many friends…and she would like the company. He blushed and stammered and looked down at his feet, saying he would have to ask his mum. When he got home to the draughty two-bedroom house, he looked at the shabby wallpaper and pestered his mother to let him go. She refused, until the phone rang a week later. When he answered, a woman with a low smoky accented voice asked to speak to his mother. Fifteen minutes later, his mother, still shaking, had walked into the room and told him to go pack his bags. He left the next morning.

When he arrived at the large house, his teacher was there to greet him. Smiling, she asked him to call her Katherine, as it was out of school time, and showed him into a room bigger than his house. The next three months were spent exploring the grounds, leaning how to clean and load a rifle, perfecting a perfect aim. She gave him books by Gogol and taught him Russian, saying it was the language of princes and poets. He thought nothing of it, revelling in her attention and light touch.

The next few years’ worth of holidays were spent like that, with fewer and fewer phone calls to his mother. He started to despise her for her weakness, her shaking decaying body. At her funeral, he barely blinked, and was the first to turn away from the grave.

He had wanted to learn boundaries, so he could then learn how to break them.   At school, he spoke less but met people’s eyes more. His teachers had noted that he had become calm and assured, a loner, and they tried to encourage interactive pursuits. So while Julian played rugby and ran the frequent ten mile runs, he would most often be found on his bed with a book, and his teachers shrugged and said that he was a model student. The best lessons he learned were with Katherine. Two months before he left, she turned up at his room. She kissed him on his forehead, a motherly gesture, and said that she had taught him everything she was meant to. He puzzled about her phrasing for a week after she left the school, and then put her out of his memory. Another lesson well taught.

When he was eighteen, in the summer after his A-levels, he went for a walk through the streets of Kensington, back in London. He felt restless; as if his mind was impatient to get older, move on. He was free from his school, and the discipline he had gladly accepted from it.

He turned the corner and came to a small park, and went to sit on the bench in front of the pond. He could see young mothers, with their designer baby bags, pushing strollers in pairs, crocodile lines of good breeding. When a woman sat down next to him, he barely raised an eyebrow. He had been expecting something.

“You were following me. I noticed on Venn Street. What do you want?” He spoke politely and without emotion.

“I want to show you yourself, Julian. Who you are and what you could become.” He made no gesture at the mention of his name, and Irina noted this with approval. Katherine’s lessons had taught him not to give too much away, to anyone.  

She had an accent, Russian, he thought, and then he turned to look at her for the first time. He took in her shoulder-length brown hair, flat hazel eyes and aristocratic bone structure and a spark of recognition caught the back of his mind. Except for colouring, they greatly resembled each other, proud features and masked eyes.

“You know who my father is. You know who has been paying for my schooling, you know my name and you know that my mother is dead. You sent me to Katherine. Therefore you don’t want to ask me any questions. You want to continue my teaching. I am useful in some way to you. I am right, yes?” His voice became faster, betraying his excitement.

Irina smiled the slow smile that took, and would always take, his breath away. She took his hand and guided him away from the banality of his life in England. In that moment, when her hand touched his for the first time, she became his everything. She became his saviour and his damnation.

On the journey, she told him few things. Her name. His father’s name. His father’s nationality. She handed him a passport with his name in it, along with a thick Russian dialect book. “You will need it”, she smiled.

They changed planes twice, in Frankfurt and again in Tallinn. He asked where they were going, and got a one-word reply. “Arkhangel’sk”. His tongue clicked on the word like ice, and he said nothing more for the rest of the journey. When the plane landed, Irina handed him a sheepskin coat, hat and gloves. “One last thing. You are no longer Julian. You left that name behind with your childhood. From now on you shall be known only by your last name. It was your mother’s maiden name, yes?” She registered his silent acquiescence with satisfaction.

In the next two years he learned how to assemble and shoot twenty-eight different types of guns, assemble and disarm thirty-two types of bombs, and fight with twelve different bladed weapons. Irina herself taught him how to fight unarmed, disenchanting him of any nonsense concerning the non-hitting of women. After the first three cracked ribs and black eyes he soon learned how to block and strike back, the perfect protégé. She clipped his blonde curls to remove another piece of his childhood, and when he stood before her, shorn like a lamb, he noticed that her hand trembled to touch him.

One afternoon she came to him. He was used to her padding around in her bare feet by then. He learned to listen for the change in the air; otherwise she made no sound. She sat on his bed, smoothing his white sheets. “There is another psychological lesson you need to learn, Sark”. Her voice was gentle but firm, and he put his book away. “You need to learn how to seduce and how to recognise seduction and either stop it or use it to your advantage.”

That night, he has sex for the first time, burying his head in her brown hair and biting her breasts. For two hours he learned how to tilt his head, bite his lip, use his looks to get what he wants. Another lesson seared into his mind by his orgasm and her moans. She taught him how to give pleasure and receive it, and his thighs trembled every time her hair brushed them, leaning down.

She left him to sleep, and noticed how he never smiled, even in his exhausted slumber. The next night, she taught him the same lessons, but this time with Nikolai, a nervous seventeen-year-old. “Men are just as easy to seduce as women, especially with your accent.” Her smile never reached her eyes, but he complied. He can fake enjoyment as well as anyone else, he supposed, and she never corrected him. He was better.

 

##  _Present_

He slides the knife out of Kris’ chest and wipes it on his handkerchief. As he straightens, he kicks out his legs, feeling the muscles tighten. He is getting old and scarred, and the thought displeases him. No one deserves to get old. It is such an undignified way to die. He turns his gaze to the disk he retrieved from Kris’ inside pocket, and allows himself a small quirk of his mouth. After being in the employ of Irina, it amuses him that some people are still so naïve as to keep disks in their pockets. From the sublime to the ridiculous, he thinks. He takes the back roads to his hotel, and goes into his room without turning on the light. The doors to the balcony are open, and he welcomes the breeze blowing the mesh curtains inwards. It carries the smell of decay out of his presence. He strips off his jacket, unbuttons his shirt in deference to the humidity. He goes through his routine check of the sparse rooms half naked, and when a hand smoothes over the muscles in his back, he shows no surprise.

She steps into the moonlight, her hand a continuing presence on his flesh, trailing over his collarbone. After eight years, her touch never fails to arouse him, still him in his tracks. She smiles that smile.  


“I waited for you to return with my package. I thought I would pick it up myself.” Irina looks up at him, new lines etched in her face, making it more beautiful. Being in her presence is like being in a holy place, sacred. Having no faith of his own, he has made her his religion, following her as strictly as any priest.  


“That was considerate of you”, he replies in a measured tone, letting her know that she didn’t shock him. She blesses him with one of her wolf grins, teeth bared. “Wasn’t it?” She leans in to bite his collarbone, fingers trailing down his arms to wrap his fingers in his. His gun thuds onto the thick carpet, unnoticed. He backs her over to the bed, bends her backwards to dip his hand in the hollow between her breasts. He wants to push his fingers within the soft flesh, cup her heart in his fist and squeeze. Killing her would be the greatest pleasure he knows, the ability to canonise. He refrains, for now: she will choose her own time. At the scene of his earliest clean kill, she had looked at the neat hole in the girl’s forehead and remarked, “That is how you will make me cold.” He hadn’t argued, even though her skin was never warm against his.

She doesn’t look away from his gaze, deep brown pools watching his blank eyes. He used to be able to see his own flashes of desire reflected in her eyes, but that changed long ago. Sark hikes up her dress, fingers now sinking into a warmth that he remembers from his first time, her noises the same. Her knuckles are harsh against his scalp, trying to push and pull simultaneously, and he moves his head from her touch. He cannot tell whether her whimper is because of his head’s movement, or his hand’s. He cannot tell if he cares or not.

The sun is pale and weak when his eyelids open, snapping wide. Another lesson. When he leaves, he doesn’t think about her prone body on the white sheets, or about the man he left in the alley. He thinks about his next Mecca, about the child of his deity. If he cannot save the mother, he thinks, he will resurrect the child. That will be his gift to her, offered up in devotion. He will teach her child how to hate, to kill with cold blood pumping through her veins. The last lesson. 


End file.
